Whereas most of the hot spots are tropical moist forests, four areas—the California Floristic Province, the Cape Floristic Province in South Africa, the Mediterranean Basin, and Southwest Australia (see the map)—are shrublands. They also are places where people live and grow crops; all four regions are noted for their wines, for example. Not only does this human activity convert land directly, but it also leads to the suppression of fire, especially near people’s homes. This alteration of natural fire regimes by the reduction in fire frequencies leads to changes in vegetation, especially to the loss of the native fire-resistant species. Globally, huge areas of grasslands and shrublands would become heavily canopied forests were all fires suppressed. The effects of changes in fire frequencies on species losses have not yet been calculated.

The seas cover more than two-thirds of Earth’s surface, yet only 210,000 of the 1,500,000 species that have been described are marine animal and plant species. Because the oceans are still poorly explored, the count of marine species may be even more of an underestimate than that of land species. For example, the Census of Marine Life, a decade-long international program begun at the start of the 21st century, added 13,000 new marine species to the total count over the first four years of the effort. As on land, the peak of marine biodiversity lies in the tropics. Coral reefs account for almost 100,000 species, yet their total area represents just 0.2 percent of the ocean surface. Between 4,000 and 5,000 species of fish—perhaps a third of the world’s marine fish—live on coral reefs. The frequently cited metaphor that “coral reefs are the rainforests of the sea” underscores their importance for conservation.

When numbers of described marine species are mapped on a worldwide scale, it becomes clear that the global centre of marine biodiversity encompasses the waters of the Philippine and Indonesian islands. Numbers of species drop steeply to the east across the Pacific and less steeply to the west across the Indian Ocean. In the Atlantic Ocean the highest levels of biodiversity are in the Caribbean. Fish, corals, mollusks, and lobsters all show similar patterns in the distributions of their species. Again mirroring the patterns on land, the places with the most species are often not the places with the most endemic species. Major centres of endemism for fish, corals, mollusks, and lobsters include the Philippines, southern Japan, the Gulf of Guinea, the Sunda Islands, and the Mascarene Islands.

With the major exception of the Great Barrier Reef of Australia, most coral reefs are off the coasts of developing countries. Rapidly increasing human populations and poverty put increasing fishing pressure on nearshore reefs. In addition, in their efforts to sustain declining fish catches, people resort to extremely damaging fishing methods such as dynamite and poisons. Coral reefs are also threatened by coastal development, pollution, and global warming. Human activities threaten some three-fourths of the world’s reefs, with the highest damage being concentrated in areas having high rates of deforestation and high runoff from the land. As the inhabitants of an area destroy their tropical forests, rains erode soils and wash the sediments down rivers into the sea, damaging the local coral reefs. Thus, the destruction of some of the most important terrestrial habitats—in the Caribbean and Southeast Asia—contributes to the destruction of some of the most important marine habitats offshore.

Whereas damage to coral reefs is important for the loss of species, the greatest physical damage to ocean ecosystems involves the effects of bottom trawling, a commercial fishing method making use of a cone-shaped bag of netting that is dragged along the seabed (seecommercial fishing: Dragged gear). Damage from bottom trawling occurs over larger areas of Earth than does tropical deforestation, and it involves even greater and more-frequent disturbances, albeit ones not easily seen. Bottom trawling disturbs about 15 million square km (6 million square miles) of the world’s seafloor each year. This area of ocean is only about 4 percent of the world total, but its small proportion belies its significance. About 90 percent of the ocean consists of deep waters so poor in nutrients that they are the equivalent of the land’s deserts. Almost all of the world’s fisheries are concentrated in the 30 million square km (12 million square miles) of nutrient-rich waters that are on the continental shelf, plus a few upwellings. On average, the ocean floor of these productive waters is trawled roughly every two years.

The otter trawl is the most widely used bottom-fishing gear. As it is dragged forward, a pair of flat plates called otter boards—one on each side of the trawl net and weighing several tons—spreads horizontally to keep the mouth of the trawl open; at the same time, a long rope with steel weights keeps the mouth open along its bottom edge. This heavy structure plows the ocean floor as it moves, creating furrows and crushing, burying, and exposing marine life. This activity destroys bottom-dwelling species including corals, brachiopods (lamp shells), mollusks, sponges, sea urchins, and various worms that live on rocks or pebbles on the seabed. It is also damaging to other species, such as polychaete worms that burrow into the seabed. Some species—deep-sea corals, for example—are extremely slow-growing, and they cannot recover before bottom trawls plow the area once again.

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